The author, who is eighteen, recounts his coming of age as a killer of jaguars in Brazil's Mato Grosso. Sashino's father is a well known lecturer in the States and is himself the author of a personal history (Tigrero, 1953). The boy was thirteen when his father took the family off to Brazil's jungles on the expedition described here -- it was time for Sashino's baptism in blood. (Sasha's father talks in the heroic cadences of Hemingway's old fisherman, Santiago.) The most respected way to take a jaguar is with a spear and these are scarce, difficult game. The hunt went on for weeks and the story includes incidents of jungle living, wild pets tamed along the way, and finally, the primitive thrill of an encounter between a spear-bearing Sashino and a jaguar.